The Ledger
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Libby: Non-lead venture capital firms offering generic operational help are redundant
“If you're not going to get one of the top VCs, you don't need five VCs that are all doing the same thing. Like, oh, we'll help you with talent, and we'll do this and that. 10 years ago that mattered, but now all those tools are available to the companies.”
Libby: Lower-cost ETF equivalents will disrupt traditional venture capital fee structures
“I think that that's going to come to the venture world too. It's been a momentum trade. And so if you're Sequoia or Forerunner or Bessemer, you have services and tools. I think it's going to be hard to prove that you should be getting two in 20 versus an ETF e…”
Chamath: Mega-Scale Investment Firms Must Maximize Fees Over Carried Interest
“But if you really want to get to mega scale and run hundreds of billions of dollars and make it a business, you have to over-orient and over-index on fees and not really focus that much on carried interest.”
Top Silicon Valley VCs Reject Corporate Pensions Due To Finite Fund Lifespans
“We have some growth in buyout mid-cap, and we just never went deep into venture, you know, seed or A round, partially because we just, you know, we're not interesting money to Sequoia and to Sand Hill Row, because Sand Hill Row says, you're not going to be her…”
Bloom: Mid-tier generalist VCs are a wasteland lacking clear value props
“The venture landscape had fundamentally changed. You were having this disruption where a barbell had formed, where on one end of that barbell, you have the Sequoia, Benchmark, Andreessen, Tiger Global, these like big name cache firms who, when they write a che…”
Xu: Capital Today beats Sequoia China on three out of five deals
“We come across Sequoia quite often in deal sourcing. And I was saying so far, We have win maybe three times out of five times.”
Sternlicht: Do not blindly trust top VC firms like a16z or Sequoia
“The key to investing is actually doing your own work. Then you triangulate other people's opinions and stuff, but do your own work. And I, the biggest mistakes like you often find when you find Andreas and Horowitz and Sequoia are, they're all in this deal. I …”
Sequoia's 2008 'Rest in Peace' Doomsday Presentation Was Incorrect
“If you were around here in the valley at the end of oh eight, Sequoia, who's a very well-regarded and has been a very successful firm, Put out this presentation called Rest in Peace, and it had a skull and crossbones and a tombstone on the front of it, and the…”
Sequoia Rejected Princeton's Endowment Lawyers' Document Comments in 2003 Fund Raise
“When I was at Princeton, Sequoia raised a fund in 2003, and they sent, Docs around, and we were very diligent. We sent our docs out to our law firm, and they came back with, like, three pages of comments, and we sent them to Sequoia, and we got a call from the…”
Elite VC Mega-Funds Trigger Copycat Fund Bloat Across the Industry
“So Sequoia goes out and raises four billion dollars, and then, you know, Billy Bob Joe's venture firm thinks they can raise four billion dollars, and by the way, there's a lot of money coming to the asset class that, that they can. So, you know, this kind of v…”
Sullivan: Power inverted as top VCs beg AI founders for 3% stakes
“When I started, if you were a smart guy in Silicon Valley, you crawled on your hands and knees up Sand Hill Road to Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins and begged them to invest. They'd invest Three million dollars and own 30% of your company. Now it's the other way ar…”
Green: Sequoia, Kleiner, and Bessemer had little differentiation beyond check size
“And I didn't frankly think there was much difference between Bessemer and Sequoia and Kleiner at the time, and General Atlantic and TCV, other than some people wrote bigger checks and smaller checks.”
Sequoia's 'Forever Fund' Belongs on the Apocalypse Wall
“Actually, the Sequoia Forever Fund is up on there too. Things where you're like, I don't understand what's going on. I'm going to put this up here.”
Don Valentine's intervention at Atari birthed hands-on venture investing
“So he got into the hot tub, and he imposed discipline on that chaotic business culture. He took the genius of their games, and he compounded it and married it with a determination to actually make an organization that functioned. So Atari went from chaos to a …”
Sequoia investment memos require 'pre-parade' sections outlining maximum upside
“The way that Sequoia addresses this bias is that it says when you're going to write a memo to the partnership about a startup that you think we should back, the investment memo, it must include a pre-parade section, meaning the section where you dream about ho…”
Sequoia formally uses decision science in capital allocation
“Sequoia, the top venture capital partnership in the world probably, Has formally incorporated decision science into the way it allocates capital.”
Hamed: A tier-one VC brand immediately removes contrarian risk from deals
“Your union square ventures. If you're Sequoia, the fact that you did the deal is the reason it's no longer contrarian.”
Nubank Has 50M Customers and a $45B Valuation
“Nubank is the largest digital bank in the world with almost 50 million customers. It's now trading at a forty five billion dollar valuation. Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway actually invested in a private round and in the IPO. Sequoia, SoftBank are investors.”
Rosenthal: Sequoia's Don Valentine valued industry perspective over financial acumen
“Don Valentine, who started Sequoia in the seventies, his big innovation in venture was this realization that, Hey, what mattered in early stage venture capital was not finance acumen. It was industry perspective.”
Gilbert: Mid-sized venture firms decline slowly because downsizing feels unnatural
“If you aren't able to actually go compete with the New York Timeses, the Sequoias, you can't raise that much capital, you can't hire that caliber of partner, whatever it is, it's really hard to downsize and pick a lane when you kind of look around and you're l…”
Capital Group housed Sequoia Capital externally to maintain focus on public markets
“Don Valentine had worked at Capital Group before founding Sequoia, and it was determined at the time that it was best housed outside of the four walls of Capital Group to keep the focus on active public management.”
Sullivan: Yale was an early backer of Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Mayfield
“Yale was already an investor with some of the preeminent firms in Silicon Valley and Boston. Sequoia, Kleiner, Perkins, Mayfield, people like that.”
Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins pioneered hands-on venture investing in the 1970s
“And these two companies, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, improvised two things in the 19 seventies. The first was this hands-on approach. Arthur Rock had been a financier by background. He had been important in things like devising equity stock options and devisi…”
Rosenthal: Sequoia Capital bought 40% of Cisco for roughly $2 million
“You look at some of the rounds that they were doing, you know, they were putting like Two million bucks into Cisco for, like, 40% of the company.”
Helmsley Charitable Trust Targets at Least 5% of Each VC Fund
“The way that we size our positions is we start out with how much is the GP raising? We want to be at least five percent of the fund. Sometimes that's not possible with a firm like Sequoia, but we want to be at least five percent of the fund. We want it to have…”
Helmsley Trust scaled its Sequoia Capital allocation to $100 million over time
“For example, we built up our Sequoia allocation slowly over time. And now we're at those kinds of numbers.”